April Special

Come play in the mud with us! Start with a Moor Mud foot soak with Geranium essential oils. Next, unwind with a 45 minute Swedish massage with Geranium aromatherapy. Finish your treatment with a Spring Fresh Facial and Moor Mud Mask. $125

Facial Special

Spring Fresh Facial with Moor Mud $50

Spring Cleaning

Start your spring cleaning with a two week cleanse at The Dragontree:

Week One features a health assessment and personalized plan, an acupuncture treatment, a garshana (brisk full body exfoliation), a swedana (therapeutic sweating), a deep tissue massage, and an epsom salt foot bath.

Week Two features an acupuncture treatment, a full body green tea salt scrub, a deep tissue massage, and an epsom salt foot bath.

Both Weeks you’ll have unlimited use of our saunas. An internal cleansing program will support detoxification and rebuilding using herbs and hypoallergenic nutrients.

An at-home plan guides you through dietary changes, skin brushing, and daily sinus and nasal cleansing.

$675 (package value = $851)

$50 discount if you schedule all treatments on weekdays.

Longevity, Part Three

By Peter Borten, L.Ac., The Dragontree’s Acupuncturist and Herbalist

This month we’ll conclude our discussion on longevity. The lifestyle recommendations I have presented in this series are by no means the only way to live a long life. However, they are some of the most universally beneficial things humans can do – both for quality and duration of life. Moreover, when we embrace these practices and our experience of life becomes richer, we actually tend to become less concerned about longevity. If you missed parts one and two of this article, you can read them here [ PART ONE | PART TWO]. Now for a few more things worth making time for in your life:

Human Touch: Human touch affects us like no other therapeutic "intervention." Compassionate touch conveys warmth, caring, connection, and reassurance. Most of us begin life getting an abundance of healthy touch from family members. Frequently, this drops off as we get older. Eventually we may start to think that real men don’t touch, or that wanting touch might make us seem desperate or perverted, or touching wouldn’t be professional or appropriate, etc. So, in addition to welcoming more touch into our lives, many of us also need to work with our mental programming to develop a healthy attitude about touching.

Massage: One of the chief benefits of massage is, of course, that it’s a safe forum for receiving compassionate touch. Then there’s its undeniable ability to alleviate stress, a known contributor to virtually all disease. Finally, massage is simply the most basic and valuable tool for physical complaints. I have seen countless headaches, backaches, and joint pains disappear from massage. I’ve even seen certain forms of massage resurrect flaccid limbs in multiple sclerosis and post-stroke. The fact that massage often feels good may be a curse. It has led to the stigmatization of massage as a "luxury item." The truth is, it’s just good health care.

Acupuncture: Acupuncture is a complete medical system. It treats everything from pain to allergies to depression to menstrual disorders. But its real strength is that its scope goes beyond fixing problems. Acupuncture has a long history of use as a tool for health maintenance and enhancement. It can be used to release emotional blockages, promote immune function, reduce stress, improve circulation, build energy, and lift the mood. It can be used to detect and correct imbalances before they show up as disease. Much of the development of acupuncture has been attributed to Taoist monks, who specifically utilized it for life extension.

Spending Time with Nature: Though I have mentioned companionship and human touch as important factors in longevity, let’s remember life isn’t all about people and people’s stuff. We are at a unique place in human history when a life can be spent almost entirely in buildings and cars, and we have to be reminded of the benefits of being in nature. Put your bare feet on the earth, tend to a garden, get in the water, sit by a fire, feel the breeze on your skin, breathe fresh air. Immerse yourself in the awe that the majesty of nature commands.

Letting Go: I believe a major reason why most humans die younger than they have to is because of all the unresolved mental and emotional garbage we carry around. Not only does it directly contribute to imbalance in our bodies, it also leads us to be negligent of our health. Everything about our past that we wish had gone differently, everything about our imagined future that we’re anxious about, and everything about the present that we can’t accept – these all amount to resistance of life. And no amount of resistance changes any of it; it only degrades our experience. There are many techniques for letting go of persistent psycho-emotional patterns (including psychotherapy, emotional freedom technique, the Sedona Method, meditation, conscious breathing, Hakomi, and more). Whatever the approach, the crux of releasing this stuff is having a willingness to feel it and a willingness to let it go. The more we let go, the more we find we are at peace.

Choosing Life: Both the most obvious and the most elusive "secret" to living longer is to love life. All of it. The war, the crime, the disease, the music, the art, the poetry, the food. It is the ultimate act of aligning ourselves with reality to fully accept that at this moment, this is what life is. If we can be grateful for that, not denying any of it, life begins to opens like a flower. To welcome every bit of it with an open heart – this is living in the truest sense.

With Love,

Peter and Everyone at the Dragontree

The Clearing Café: Serving superb food, coffee, tea and juices with nearly all organic and local ingredients!

We now offer spa lunches. Add a spa lunch to your spa package for $10 and make a day of it!